1120 40th Street
Rock Island, IL 61201
guild@genesius.org
and
3706 Kenwood Ave.
Davenport, IA 52807

Show / Hide Navigation

As part of our ongoing radio drama series (listen here), we are excited to produce some pieces written by George Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell. Cook and Glaspell were two of the founders of the Provincetown Players - a group of thespians formed in 1915 that had a lasting impact on American theater. They also have a Quad Cities connection: both Cook and Glaspell grew up in Davenport, Iowa. Producing these shows allows us to explore some classican American theater, while connecting to Quad Cities history.

Our first audio production of Provincetown Players pieces is a two-part performance: Suppressed Desires, by Cook and Glaspell, and The Game: A Morality Play by Louise Bryant. Listen to the latest uploads of Genesius Guild Radio Productions below:

Background Information

In 1915, two Davenport, Iowa, natives, Susan Glaspell and George Cram Cook, started a theater group in Provincetown on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, which turned out to have a profound influence on American drama forever. This visionary new company, the “Provincetown Players,” had humble beginnings in some sympathetic friends’ private home.

Susan Glaspell had grown up in Davenport, gone to Drake University in Des Moines, and worked as a reporter in Des Moines for a time, before devoting herself more fully to her creative writing. She had published numerous short stories and two novels, and had spent time in Paris as well, before she married George Cram Cook, or “Jig” Cook, as everyone called him, and went off with him to the East. Jig Cook, also from Davenport, went off to Harvard for college, and studied further in Europe before returning to the midwest in the last years of the 19th century to teach English and Classical literature at the University of Iowa. He had also written fiction, but he is especially remembered as a charismatic personality. He and Susan had known each other for some time when in 1913 they married and embarked on the passionate quest that would transform their own lives as well as American theater.

In search of like-minded artists and intellectuals, Susan and Jig established relationships in Provincetown and Greenwich Village. Provincetown was the site of their first home as a married couple, and their lives swung between the poles of Cape Cod and New York. Jig was the driving force, the leader and organizer, who had the intense Dionysian vision of creating in the United States a culturally and artistically important theater that would be parallel to the great Classical drama of fifth-century BC Athens. Jig was Dionysian also in his appetites: he imported red Italian wine to Provincetown by the barrel, and sometimes gave names to the barrels themselves, names like Sappho, Bacchus, and – most theatrical of all – Aeschylus, an allusion to the author of the great Oresteia trilogy, one of the most imposing monuments of Greek tragic drama.

While Jig’s vision was grandiose, the couple’s first play, “Suppressed Desires,” presented a slice of life, a spoof on an intellectual craze that was especially timely, centering on the thought of Sigmund Freud. A few years earlier, Freud had made a visit to the United States, and his theories were making quite a splash, not least among the bohemians and artists Jig and Susan were spending time with – and perhaps most of all with a fellow Quad-Cities native, Floyd Dell, a journalist who was writing about psychoanalysis extensively in various newspapers and talking about it constantly to everyone who would listen. The play show both intense interest in Freud’s theories (including a reference to the Oedipal complex), but also playfully bursts the bubble of overconfident claims to understand the workings of the subconscious. Susan and Jig wrote their short play, and submitted it to the Washington Square players for possible production, but it was rejected – as had been also a short play by Neith Boyce and a whole set of scripts by a young unknown Eugene O’Neill.

In the end, the next summer, in 1915, Jig, Susan, and Neith decided to mount their own production of their work at the Provincetown home of Neith and her husband Hutchins Hapgood – and this was the unlikely launch of a theater company that would change the world. The first performance of “Suppressed Desires” was a great success, and the Provincetown Players re-staged it a number of times. Eugene O’Neill’s material soon found a home in Provincetown too. The word spread, ambitions rose, the productions moved to a bigger building on the Provincetown wharf; and after a couple of seasons there, the company, under Jig’s leadership, shifted its headquarters to Greenwich Village, New York. For a few very busy years, the company produced a flurry of playwriting and performances drawing on the talents of countless bright stars of American creativity. Eugene O’Neill, whose work frequently, like Cook’s obsessions, drew inspiration from ancient Greece, became one of the most celebrated American playwrights of all time.

A few years after the foundation of the Provincetown Players, Jig Cook actually moved with Susan to his beloved Greece, to Delphi, the famous site of the ancient oracle of Apollo, but he soon took sick unexpectedly and died – that was 1924, and Jig was only 50 years old; Susan Glaspell lived on and continued her life as a writer, adding to the mystique of her late husband by writing his biography, The Road to the Temple. In 1931, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her play, Alison’s House. She continued writing and publishing, especially novels, until her death in 1948, at the age of 72. Although neglected at times, her work has been revived and celebrated more and more in the 21st century; among other appreciations, she has been called the “heir to Ibsen and Shaw.” By virtue of Jig Cook’s vision, Susan Glaspell’s writing, and the efforts of countless others, the Provincetown Players and their work have truly achieved the status of American classics.

More Information:

Once again, it's Susan Glaspell! - Quad City Times editorial by Alma Gaul

George Cram Cook's The Spring: Bridging the Gap Between Spirituality and Science - Rachel Hall '19 Senior Inquiry Project for Augustana College

A History of the Provincetown Playhouse - provincetownplayhouse.com